Friday, 27 November 2015

Passwords are a fucking
nightmare. Everything about them is unbeautiful, not least the fact
that they are totally un-fucking-necessary. Why, when I want to buy a
bag of budgie seed online do I need to create and remember a password
(along, of course, with details of my age, sexual orientation and
inside-leg measurement)?

And just look at their
instructions: it must be more than x but less than y letters in
length; it must contains at least one capital letter; and - the
noirest of my bȇtes
- it must (or must not) contain characters like !@£$%^&*.
They make this demand and then they monitor your effort,
condescendingly telling you your choice is weak, moderate or,
grudgingly, adequate. Then, just when the budgie seed seems to be
within your grasp at last, they ask you to create and answer two
questions that give hints to your password if you should lose or
forget it. Let's say your password is T6raVolt&6.
What two questions would bring that to mind? Exactly.

And, to tear the last
shred from your disintegrating morale, come the exhortations that you
should [a] never use the same password for different sites; [b]
change your password regularly; [c] never write your passwords down.
So, if like me, your needs go beyond an occasional pack of red
millet, you could, in theory, have 20-30 passwords, ALL DIFFERENT,
not written down anywhere, and in any case destined to be replaced
every few months, capitals, hieroglyphs and all. Well,
fuk&-th6t
for a g§me 0v
solDieRz!

Saturday, 14 November 2015

I was on assignment in
Angola three times when the civil war was still raging. The most
dangerous was when I was posted to Huila Province in the south. I was
regularly stopped by FAPLA patrols, and even my UNDP Passport didn't
save me from interrogation. I am tall, bearded and white - I looked
like a South African UNITA-loving mercenary, I couldn't blame the
FAPLA soldiers for being suspicious, and I didn't regard it as racist
or unfair. Just a sensible precaution.

When a terrorist attack
occurs in a major European city and ISIS claims responsibility, it
would be understandable if the police stopped anyone of an Arab
appearance to check on them. Of course this would produce an outcry
of racist discrimination, etc, not only from the Muslim community
leaders (what is their agenda, I wonder?) but also from all the civil
liberties human rights etc organisations. So, while there is a lot of
handwringing going on, and pious vows to “bring the terrorists to
justice”, in reality the authorities in our countries do very
little, and in many cases probably don't WANT to do very much for
fear of being accused of illiberal behaviour.

Political Correctness
is paralysing us, and it's time to shout out loud that the Emperor
has no Clothes.

I approve - don't we all? - of heightened security at airports and other public places, but I sometimes wonder if it's little more than window-dressing. Going through security in the States has become quite farcical in some ways. Because I have a pacemaker, I have a physical "patdown", usually by a nice filipino man who assures me in a soft voice that "I will only use the back of my hand for the more intimate parts, sir." So sweet.The shoes come off, of course, but nobody bothers to look at them. It's just ritual. And the last time I went through LA, the fingerprint bobby couldn't cope with the fact that the annular finger of my left hand is badly crooked. I explained to him that it was the result of Dupuitren's Contracture, but that didn't stop him spending twenty minutes - I don't exaggerate - determined to straighten it and get an imprint of the pad of the finger into his records.
Another thing that fascinates me is that they take the same information every time you enter the country. This means that they now have at least TWELVE Jake Allsop's on file, photos and prints and biodata, and all of them ME. If they ever set out to find me, they'd be running round like hot-arsed bluebottles.

Tuesday, 10 November 2015

You are driving along
sedately when a vehicle coming from the other direction toots its
horn. Who? Me? What? Trafficator not cancelled? Foglights left on?
Too close to the crown of the road? What? I crane my neck to see if I
have a muntjac wedged in the radiator grill. I check to be sure my
doors are all closed and my seatbelt securely fastened. I even check
my flies. Bafflement. Perhaps it was someone who recognised me?
Perhaps it was someone who hates me because of the way I voted at the
last election?

By now, I am a bundle
of nerves. I hate mysteries. And I need to know what I was doing
wrong. Because, you can be sure that I, brought up on a diet of cod
liver oil and guilt, always assume that everything is my fault.

Then I try on a
different thought for size: maybe the hoot wasn't directed at me at
all. The bastard! How dare he ignore me?!

Monday, 9 November 2015

I have spent most of my fragmented male life admiring the female bosom, openly or surreptitiously depending on the circumstances. I must be the bane of feminists: the fascistic patriarch, reducing women to sex objects, a closet rapist, etc, etc. Not true, but they won't believe me, they have the comforting security of the closed mind, why should they come out of their comfort zone?
In the meantime, I was greatly heartened to come across this photograph, in which one woman is clearly appraising the bosom of another. What was going through her mind? Approval? Envy? Disapproval? Disgust? Lust?
Personally, I will give her the benefit of the doubt: she was probably thinking what I would be thinking, though couched in slightly different language: What a fine pair of boobs! If you've got 'em, flaunt 'em! To which I would add, they constitute yet one more proof, pace St Augustine, for the existence of God.
So there.

The logic of department store display policy is beyond me.
You get a rack of shirts, usually laid in a display cabinet with about seven shelves one above the other. So far, so good. But what I don't understand is why the SMALLEST sizes are on the TOP shelf, and the LARGEST sizes are on the BOTTOM shelf. In other words, a tall guy like me has to stoop to check the collar size, a shortarse has to stand on tiptoe. I asked the assistant why. "It's company policy, sir," he replied.
I used to buy my socks in packs of three, all the same colour. Then, for no reason, the store stopped doing those packs, and instead did three-packs of assorted colours. I wanted three burgundy-coloured pairs, I didn't want one green, one blue and one purple. I asked the assistant to make up a three-pack of burgundy-coloured socks. Can't do it, sir. Why not? "It's company policy, sir," he replied.
So, let's go to the local supermarket and stock up on a few ready meals. But, oh dear, the labelling. Everything you don't need to know is in HUGE LETTERS. The vital information, ie, what the meal actually is in MINISCULE.

GOURMET MEAL

Special Recipe

World-wide reputation

Beef cannelloni

You may wonder why they do it. "Company policy, sir," they reply. Actually, it doesn't matter because the next time you visit the supermarket, they will have changed all the displays around anyway, so the ready meals which were in Aisle 5 are now in Aisle 7 next to the detergents and the sanitary products. Why? Come on, you already know the answer!

I was born and brought up in this village. As children we had so much to explore and enjoy: two railways LMS and GWR; a branch of the Shropshire Union Canal; old mine workings (very mysterious, these); and lots of fields with ponds, ditches, hedges, derelict barns, and things you couldn't put a name to. A great place to be a child.
It's gone now. They destroyed it to make a bypass as part of a new town development called Telford, needed to take the overspill from the West Midland towns like Birmingham.
The Primary School that I went to, a churchy-looking building, is now a mosque; or it might be a Hindu temple. I don't know, and I don't care. It's all alien to me now.
I went back to Hadley once. I will never go again.

Was politics always a dirty business? We are in the middle of a campaign for the next President of the United States, and is seems that the dirty tricks brigades are more in evidence than ever. Sober debate gives way to sniping, personal abuse and nasty insinuendoes, as they say in Liverpool. If you don't understand this cartoon, I admire you. But you can be sure it's saying something nasty but totally irrelevant about Presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton. There are sound arguments why she would not be a good President, but the message of her personal inadequacy conveyed by this cartoon is not one of them.

Why is this funny? Simply because there is a shift in the frame of reference. Postmen/mailmen deliver mail. That's their job. So when he says what he says here, he is shifting to another frame of reference: now he is a curmudgeon who's only concerned with his own comfort, not with doing the job he's paid to do.
This is the stuff of humour, but it is also the stuff of social dysfunction. Watch out for it, watch out for the many occasions when the social order is disrupted because someone doesn't play the game according to the rules any more. Sometimes it's funny, but in the long run, it's bad for social cohesion.
It's a good joke, though, isn't it?!

How can one not respect honesty? Tell me what you sincerely think or believe, and I must respect you for that. It is your right. But every right should carry a corresponding responsibility. In this case, in honestly expressing your opinion, it's not a bad idea to express in a way that makes your point rather than causing offence, because, if you cause offence, people will look at your finger rather than at the direction in which you are pointing.
All the same, I love this cartoon!

What bothers me about officially-sanctioned same-sex marriage is not that homosexuals (who seem to be among the last people in the western world who believe in marriage, the rest of us living in sin) should or should not marry, but that once it is legal, it then becomes illegal for me to believe that marriage ought to be between one man and one woman. In a queer way, the traditional intolerance of homosexuality has been replaced by an intolerance of anyone who has a different view. For what it's worth, I think these officials who in all conscience cannot preside over a gay marriage should have their views respected, just as a doctor may be excused from performing an operation such as an abortion which is in conflict with his deeply-held convictions.
I know that writing this opens me to flaming as a raging homophobe, but would simply confirm my point that intolerance is found at all points in the spectrum these days.

We suffer in the fens from a blight called "fly tipping", where people will drive out to a remote part of the fen at a time when they are unlikely to be seen in order to dump their unwanted items, usually bulky things like refrigerators and mattresses. Sometimes the dump consists of a mountain of old tyres or ironmongery. In addition, the minor road verges of the fens are often festooned with all manner of detritus - drinks bottles, food wrappers and so on - thrown from the windows of passing cars.
That's the problem. Don't ask me what the solution is. OK, education, but the state of our education system gives me no cause for optimism.
What a way to start the week!

Saturday, 7 November 2015

My first blog, Old Scrote's Home, was started mainly as a way of staying in touch with my family, half of whom are in California, the other half in Auckland, New Zealand. As they - and I - have grown older, and as means of communication have improved (Skype, Facetime, Whatsapp, etc), the need for the blog has diminished, I shall leave it open, partly for the vain reason that I like going back over the posts to remind myself what was in my head in those years.

The title of this new blog, Grumpy Old Scrote, really says it all. There are so many things going on in the world that get my goat or my dander up, and I don't mean only the obvious targets like political correctness and the ineptitude of those in authority. My hackles are raised and my nerves are got on by anything that, according to my mind, demeans us ordinary chaps.